Tag Archives: Technical Documentation

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Adrian Baniak has written an article (3 Ways to Engage with Today’s Empowered Consumer) about how brands can “cut through the clutter” and communicate with their customers and prospect. He states one of the key ways to do this is “Write Your Own Tale, Or Someone Else Will Do It First”.

This mantra was originally made by Lisa Shalett, a partner at Goldman Sachs, and the global head of brand marketing and digital strategy. Continue reading →

Cherryleaf’s Director of Sales and Marketing, Ellis Pratt will moderating the panel discussion “Assisting the Millennial User – Challenges and Opportunities in the Decade Ahead“, which is part of the free Adobe Day at the UAEurope Conference 2013. On the panel will be Chris Despopoulos, Craig Clark, Dave Gash, David Farbey, Matthew Ellison, Paula Stern and Willam van Weelden. This free event will be held Wednesday, 12th June, 12:00pm to 5:00pm

HCC Embedded is a high tech software corporation that develops specialist software for deeply embedded systems, such as file systems, USB and networking software.

Dave Hughes, CEO of HCC, realised that with over 100 different modules to be documented, often with inter-dependent content and frequent updates, managing the documents in Microsoft Word had become unmanageable and untraceable.

HCC’s documentation assists users developing with the products, and it plays an important role in the marketing of HCC’s products to developers. This means keeping a consistent format and brand across all this material is critical to the organization.

One of the challenges for Technical Authors is quantifying the value of what they produce. For example, how can you tell how many people are reading online Help when the software is installed on someone’s desktop computer? One application mentioned in passing as last week’s UAEurope conference, ApplicationMetrics, might be able to provide the answer.

ApplicationMetrics collects usage and platform data, behind the scenes. It’s a product that is no longer being developed any more, but you can still download it. It may enable you to collect “operational funnel” data that’s similar marketing funnel data – test and track whether users are going to the help and resolving their issues.

Cherryleaf is curating and hosting a programme of talks on trends in technical documentation. At these sessions, there’s a presentation from a respected member of the Technical Communication profession, plus the opportunity to network with your peers.

We’re looking for people who would like to present a case study or share their view of the future trends in technical communication with their peers. It’s a great place to practice a presentation you’re preparing for a conference later in the year.

Each talk is hosted by Cherryleaf in central London, and lasts approximately two hours. Spaces are limited to 12 delegates.

The first talk was held on 24/1/2012: on What will be the future for Technical Communicators if everything ‘just works’?

The second talk is likely to be on technical authoring in The Cloud (if we can find an additional speaker).

If you’d like to explore the idea of speaking at one of these talks, then contact us and we’d be happy to discuss it with you.

I decided to try out London’s Barclays Cycle Hire, known colloqually as “Boris bikes”, yesterday. There are 6,000 bicycles distributed across central London that you can hire on an ad-hoc basis.

While the scheme is a great concept, for the casual user it lacks something – information on using the bikes! Where user information is provided (on the Transport for London web site and on the payment ticket, for example), it’s pretty good:

However, I couldn’t find any information on how to book and return a bike on the docking station terminals themselves. The terminals are where the casual user pays for the hiring of a bike and receives the code for releasing a bike from its clamp:

A little bit of information at the docking station terminal itself would, I’m sure, encourage even more people to use this valuable and worthy service.